Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

Later, when my parents had left Russia and the flat was empty, I would still find marvelous things from time to time (a whole handful of silver spoons scattering from an overhead cupboard where we kept nails and bottles of turps), but I was beginning to lay its depths bare. I found, among the papers, the most various things: my acquaintance of old, the unknown naked woman on the divan, and another picture, which I have before me right now.

I am touched, not by the “piquant scene” as they might have said back then, but by all the objects indicative of an era. A blonde woman in dark-colored knickers and bra sits with an unlit cigarette. It reminds me of a home movie from the nineties, a genre painting adapted for home and for a single viewer. It’s a stylized shot, a Russian pin-up, done with half an eye on seen or invented examples of the genre, and an attempt to adapt them to a set of completely unsuitable circumstances. It’s a conservative image, most things are strategically covered up, but this doesn’t stop it being reckless and even indecent.

A fresh copy of the Soviet newspaper Pravda makes the photograph dangerous (placing a naked lascivious ass on the party organ could get you a few years in prison), not to mention the packet of Belomor cigarettes (with the emblem of the White Sea Canal, built by slave labor) in her left hand. The country’s main newspaper and its cheapest cigarettes, stubby and potent, are brought together like heraldic symbols, linked by the female body. The body seems indifferent to both. The room looks like a temporary lean-to, an institutional bathhouse dressing room. The high heels resemble cabaret costume, along with the underwear, which is too well cut for Soviet underwear. All this at the end of the 1940s, or the very beginning of the 1950s, the holy winter of Stalin’s rule with its ponderous sensibility, the rows of party cars lined up at theater stage doors, a second wave of terror, the “Doctors’ Plot.” In the corner of the picture, stuck up on a limewashed wall, is a crass caricature of a “capitalist” doffing his hat.

In later, safer years Grandfather Lyonya found himself another occupation to add to his many activities: he began writing and publishing satirical sketches of various kinds. These were mostly funny little anecdotes, short jokey dialogues or paradoxical phrases, sometimes also didactic prose, and some strange little hybrids — work reports in verse, for example. His ease with rhyme — he had a natural virtuosity, he could fit any subject into its neat envelope — did not improve his writing. His anecdotes were funny, though, and were even sometimes published in the top Soviet satirical magazine of the era, Krokodil . He stuck the clippings proudly into special exercise books. I remember some from my childhood: “Never eat on an empty stomach!” was one. A favorite mode of his was writing little stories about “other cultures and customs.” He would write about different, half-invented worlds, peopled by hopelessly bourgeois Frenchmen called Pierre and Antoine, but the satire slid into something stranger, as if the story was about a dream that could never be realized, and all that was left was to make fun of it.

Any anecdote is just a novel compressed down to a point, and it can equally well be reinflated to elephantine proportions. The opposite must also exist, when your intended meaning is too large even to want to try to fit it to a form. My grandfather’s jokes (they were printed anonymously) were based on the belief in another world that bubbled up with attractive possibilities, a world in which erotic excitement hung in the air, a world of live and let live. There was something perennially old-fashioned in them, as if the characters wore bowler hats and cuff links: “At his wife’s funeral Mr. Smiles comforted his wife’s weeping lover: now don’t you take on so, I’ll be married again in a tick!”

I should add here that in contrast to his generation of compatriots who never left the Soviet Union, Lyonya was a lucky exception. He had been abroad — this family story was repeatedly told to me from my earliest childhood. Lyonya was born in 1912 with clubfoot. I couldn’t see anything wrong with his feet in the old photographs, just a baby with such pale eyes they looked white, lying on his stomach. They treated the condition thoroughly, took it all very seriously, and managed to cure him. Every summer Lyonya’s mother took him to the same Swiss sanatorium where there were green hills, and Lyonya learned to walk better and better on the hills until he was ready for the new life , in which all travel would cease. But he remembered Switzerland very well. When he was privy to those classic Soviet intelligentsia conversations about where one would go if one were able, and Paris, Tokyo, and Rome were flung down like hands of playing cards, he would sit without saying a word. If you asked him directly he would answer without hesitation: I would go to Switzerland.

Lyonya, or so I was told, wrote his first academic thesis on a hospital windowsill, during a period of recuperation when he was supposed to be resting, although he couldn’t bear to sit still. He was full of curiosity, he always had a new interest, and the range of these different interests brought its own financial rewards: they always lived well.

Articles, books, lecturing in three different academic institutes didn’t satisfy him. It was as if he sensed that he’d been made for bigger things, or other things, and he threw himself into ever newer pursuits, ticking more and more boxes on some invisible form. I suspect that the shadowy “little friends” were all part of this hunger, if they didn’t fill a hole, then they momentarily satisfied a need that was invisible to everyone else. His cup of life ran over. He designed transport interchanges, he played chess, he invented things, and applied for patents for them — including an object that always fascinated me. I boasted about it in childhood, and I am still proud of it today: a complicated mechanism for testing whether a watermelon is off. The pointlessness of its complication gave it a special thrill because you knew even as you used it that you could tell whether a watermelon was off simply by flicking a finger against it and listening for the tight echoing of its belly.

These displacement activities were joined by the constant rhyme-mongering. His talented nature found expression here too, and the verses came tumbling out whenever there was an occasion for such jokes in verse. Before the war he had enjoyed a reputation as a very witty man, adept at table talk. Nobody I spoke to remembered him from that time, though. My mother’s friends remembered him as a preoccupied and glum man, who would greet them and then disappear off to his own business. Lyolya was the life and soul of the house, everyone loved her and she loved everyone. She baked cake after cake, embroidered table­cloth after tablecloth, knew everyone and remembered everything. She kept a whole huge family of second and third cousins together, held them close to her heart. The Doctors’ Plot left her without work until a contact of Sarra invited her to work with them at a medical inspection point. Offering work to a Jewish doctor was a gesture of extreme nobility, almost a suicidal act at that time, and she remained there for the rest of her working life, either out of gratitude or because she had no more desire to move.

After Lyolya died my mother didn’t mention her to me for a very long time, and then suddenly she asked if I remembered Grandmother. I did. “And what was she like?” “She adored me,” I said with certainty. And I know this of her: she was adored by everyone, near and far, the light of collective adoration is blinding to this day and prevents me from seeing any detail. What was she like? Auntie Sima, my old nanny, who remembered a time when everyone was young, answered my questions brusquely: “She was a happy creature. She’d put on her perfume and her lipstick and run off to a meeting on the boulevard.” What meeting? Who was she meeting — the mysterious Nelidov? My mother’s friend came to see me to tell me more family history, and when I asked for details, she said simply: “She was a… she was a proper lady,” and would say no more.